New school or Old school? best bang for your buck.

So far there's never been any question I couldn't get answered here without searching, but now I need to seek council from those of you whom consider yourself server-hardware guru's. I would consider myself a fore-most expert on power-user hardware, single cpu systems, even multi-core. But I know diddly squat when it comes to server hardware, so here's my dilemma:

If given the option between the following servers (all other things being equal and the processors/ram running at their respective clock frequencies):


(Running Server 2003)
Dual Opteron 246's w/ 2GB RAM
~ or ~
Quad Xeon (P III) 900Mhz w/2GB RAM
~ or ~
8-way Xeon (PIII) 700Mhz w/4GB RAM

Which would you recommend/choose for either:

a) A server thats primary duty was web serving. Mostly MSSQL inquiries - which server would be able to handle the most requests concurrently and due the job, well, better.

~ or ~

b) Running multiple game servers (i.e. BF2 or CSS) - which server would be able to handle the most concurrent stand-alone servers of say, 32 players?



To me it seems the 8-way Xeon would scale better for each, but I'm really just guessing here.

Knowing that a single 32 player game server of either game would probably not max out a single 700Mhz Xeon(I could be wrong here, I'm just going of past experiences), I should theoretically be able to run 8 instances since Server 2K3 is multi processor aware right?

It just "feels" like an 8cpu system (albeit much slower Clocks/IPC/FSB) would scale better than a dual core system with more balls. But if that were the case, wouldn't everyone be going with older cheaper systems?

I'm about to get fiber to my house and I'm going to get rid of my dedicated servers and run them from home. Any and all help and guidance in this area is greatly appreciated.

And thanks a lot in advance.



-Cheers

 

 

 

 

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